1. Field of the invention
The present invention is generally concerned with wiring accessories designed to be fitted to the previously stripped end of the stranded conductive core of an electrical conductor to facilitate and render more secure the connection of the conductor to a terminal.
The wiring accessories, usually referred to as terminal connectors, may incorporate an eyelet or a forked or plain tab for making the connection and some types, through which direct connection to the conductor core is made, incorporate an insulative collar. They include a metal shank to be crimped onto the conductive core end and must first be fitted to the latter.
The present invention is particularly directed to the combination of operations necessary to execute a crimp of this kind.
2. Description of the prior art
The first step is to fit the wiring accessory over the conductive core end.
The corresponding crimping must then be done.
Although supplying wiring accessories in strip form was proposed long ago, the accessories routinely available on the market at this time are usually supplied loose in bulk.
They must therefore be taken one by one from a container as required and when executed manually this operation is made all the more difficult in that the wiring accessories are comparatively small.
In any event, this operation inevitably wastes time and it ca also lead to non-negligible wastage of wiring accessories if these are dropped when picked out of the container.
A crimping tool resembling a pair of pliers is usually used to do the crimping.
There are two common types of crimping tool.
In a first type which is relatively light in weight and cheap the crimping entails only a localized deformation of the wiring accessories concerned.
In the second, significantly heavier and more costly type the whole of a wiring accessory of this kind is compacted, introducing some redundancy.
These crimping tools share the disadvantage of imposing a break in the continuity of the operations to be carried out to use them; an operator who has just fitted the wiring accessory to the conductive core end before crimping it usually has to let go of the wiring accessory temporarily to pick up the tool for crimping it.
As a result the wiring accessory may fall off before it is crimped, either because the corresponding operations have not been carried out correctly or because the electrical conductor to be fitted with the accessory is already installed and is difficult of access: this leads to additional wastage of time and materials.
Known crimping tools usually share a further disadvantage in that a plurality of different crimping positions have to be provided alongside each other to cater for a specific range of different wiring accessory sizes (and even so without covering all possible sizes), the operator having to choose the one that is suitable for the wiring accessory he has to crimp.
The hesitation inherent to any such choice can only lead to further wasted time.
The patent US-A-Re.24.604 proposes a dispenser forming a crimping tool; one of its handles forms a magazine and is adapted to receive a plurality of parallel wiring accessories.
Apart from its complexity, this dispenser has the disadvantage of being able to accommodate only one size of wiring accessory, in this specific instance tags.
An object of the present invention is a magazine-type wiring accessory crimping tool that is free of the aforementioned disadvantages.